Cohort Profile: The Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH)

Abstract

The Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH) is one of very few long-standing, publicly available longitudinal cohort studies in a sub-Saharan African (SSA) context. It provides a rare record of more than a decade of demographic, socioeconomic and health conditions in one of the world's poorest countries. The MLSFH was initially established in 1998 to study social network influences on fertility behaviours and HIV risk perceptions, and over time the focus of the study expanded to include health, sexual behaviours, intergenerational relations and family/household dynamics. The currently available data include MLSFH rounds collected in 1998, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2012 for up to 4000 individuals, providing information about socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, sexual behaviours, marriage, household/family structure, risk perceptions, social networks and social capital, intergenerational relations, HIV/AIDS and other dimensions of health. The MLSFH public use data can be requested on the project website: http://www.malawi.pop.upenn.edu/.

HIV/AIDS-related Expectations and Risky Sexual Behaviour in Malawi

“…The Kohler et al (2014). The MLSFH cohorts were selected to represent the rural population, where the majority of Malawians (85%) live in poor health conditions similar to those prevailing in other rural SSA low-income countries (over 60% of total SSA population lives in rural areas): high morbidity/mortality, over-burdened health facilities, and frequently unmet nutritional needs.…”

“…Without loss of generality, let be a constant such that + = − − (as in Section 4, it measures the cost of living with HIV). The maximization problem presented would become: (Kohler et al, 2014;Anglewicz et al, 2007).…”

“…We seek to draw inferences on the structural preference parameters − and to evaluate whether 11 We view self-reported behavior and biomarker as complements because STI status does not have a one-to-one relationship with frequency of unprotected sexual behavior (e.g., Fishbein et al, 2000). In the MLSFH context, tests of gonorrhoea, chlamydia, and trichomoniasis were conducted in 2004 but were not repeated given their low prevalence in the study population (Kohler et al, 2014). The low prevalence suggests that those specific STIs were not very common and/or, the STI management for these curable STIs was relatively good, making it a poor proxy for risky sexual behavior.…”

“…and Delavande (2014) review the existing evidence and conclude that collecting expectations data in developing countries is both feasible and valuable. 2 In this paper, we use data on probabilistic expectations about a wide range of events that we have collected as part of the 2006 wave of the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH, Kohler et al, 2014) covering more than 3,000 adult respondents in rural Malawi. 3 In Delavande and Kohler (2009), we find that respondents from Malawi provide meaningful expectations in probabilistic format according to various criteria: most respondents provide probabilities that are consistent with basic properties of probability theory, the subjective expectations are systematically correlated with observable characteristics (such as gender, age, education, and region of residence) in the same way that actual outcomes vary with these variables, and expectations about future events vary across individuals in the same way as individuals' past experience does.…”

Pragmatic tradition or romantic aspiration? The causes of impulsive marriage and early divorce among women in rural Malawi

“…The MLSFH started in 1998 and has since collected seven rounds of data (Kohler et al 2015). It provides a record of more than a decade of demographic, socioeconomic, and health data, including detailed marital and birth histories.…”